Mrs. Natalie

“Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars

“But I don't think I ought to leave my friends like this, after all we have gone through together.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“Maisie’s phone rings. The house rule is no phones at the table but we’ve made an exception for Maisie who keeps getting calls from neighbors asking for help, and we made an exception for Emily so that Benny can text her and tell her what time he’ll be back at the house, and so of course we extended the exception to Nell, because why would we let her sisters answer their phones at the table and make her turn hers off? Joe and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here”
― Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

“Dr. Hoffman told me the word kumbaya was originally an African American spiritual, a song that was also a prayer asking for divine intervention, asking for help in dire times, and that then the hippies in the sixties took it and sang it to mean unity amid protest, and then it got played out and became a stand-in for corniness about togetherness.”
― Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars